Pinnacle: Five Principles that Take Your Business to the Top of the Mountain

GROWTH GETS HARDER WHEN THE BUSINESS DEPENDS TOO MUCH ON YOU.

[THIS BOOK HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN AND IS BEING RE-PUBLISHED AS 5 CLIMBS THAT TAKE YOUR BUSINESS TO THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN.]

Pinnacle is a practical roadmap for founders, owners, and CEOs of privately held companies with 15–100 employees who want to scale with confidence, strengthen accountability, build a self-managing business, and dramatically increase company value.

Most leadership teams reach a point where growth slows, accountability weakens, and the business becomes too dependent on the founder. Pinnacle shows how to break through those ceilings and build a company that grows with more clarity, discipline, and value.

Drawing on decades of coaching experience, Steve Preda and Gregory Cleary distilled business growth into Five Core Principles—People, Purpose, Playbooks, Perform, and Profit—supported by 15 practical disciplines that help leadership teams create clarity, accountability, and momentum.

Inside, you’ll learn how to:

• Build an A-player team and culture that energize growth
• Clarify purpose and strategy so the team moves in one direction
• Execute with discipline using Rocks, Metrics, and high-impact meetings
• Systematize the business with Playbooks that improve consistency and scale
• Increase profitability and multiply company value over time

Unlike theory-heavy manuals or startup-only guides, Pinnacle is built for growth-stage companies that need practical structure without corporate bureaucracy. It gives leadership teams the tools to scale with discipline, strengthen execution, and build a company that becomes more valuable over time.

If you’ve found value in books like Traction, Scaling Up, or The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Pinnacle continues that practical tradition—helping leadership teams avoid burnout, build alignment, and create a company that can scale beyond the founder.

Why aim for a 5X business value? Because ambitious targets create better companies. They attract stronger talent, sharpen focus, improve decisions, and give owners more options—growth, succession, or financial freedom.

Pinnacle is more than a business book. It is a practical guide to building a profitable, self-managing, highly valuable company—one that scales beyond the founder, empowers the team, and creates greater freedom, impact, and long-term value.

Praise for Pinnacle:

"When one reaches tor the highest, they must be touched by the soul of it! Read this book deeply."
Michael E. Gerber, Author of The E-Myth Revisited

"This book is remarkable. Growing your business is hard work and, with many moving parts, business owners rarely have full visibility on what needs to be done. Pinnacle distills countless hours of thinking across many different disciplines and delivers only the essentials you need to build a great growing company. I'm confident you'll keep coming back to it time and time again until you reach the top. Get it, read it and apply it."
David Jenyns - Founder of SYSTEMology

"Pinnacle is the definitive guide for leaders who want to build a great company: A company that achieves superior financial results; makes a distinctive impact to its customers, employees, and community; and is built to succeed beyond the influence of a founder. This book represents a rare blend of the key principles and the "how" to actually apply those principles to a company of any size. This book will forever change you, your leadership team, and your organization."
Luke Carlson, CEO, Discover Strength

Steve Preda's passion is to help Entrepreneurs reach their Ideal Lives while creating a Positive Impact. He built and sold an investment banking firm in his native Hungary before moving to the US. After arriving, he coached Vistage CEO peer groups before becoming an EOS Implementer and Pinnacle Business Guide.Currently Steve is the CEO of Steve Preda Business Growth, that recently launched Summit OS, an evolution of EOS, Scaling Up, and Pinnacle Business Guides. Summit OS and its sequel, Strategy OS, are Coherent, Customizable and Scalable business operating systems, that allow businesses to grow into Inc 5000, and even to Fortune-ranked companies.Steve and his fellow Summit OS Guides help small to medium size businesses become fast-growing, high-profit and self-managing. Many of Summit OS clients then Dig a Moat Around their Business by implementing the toolkit of Strategy OS as well.Steve has authored 4 best-selling books: Buyable, Pinnacle (with Gregory Cleary), Strategy OS, and Summit OS for Doctors, and he hosts the popular Management Blueprint(R) podcast.

Gregory ClearyFounder PINNACLE Business Guides I Certified Scaling Up Coach I Former Certified EOS Implementer. I love working with Leadership Teams to help them Summit their Business Mountain! The PINNACLE of Business CoachingGreg was one of the first Certified EOS Implementers(R) and implemented EOS with well over 100 companies before taking his coaching in a different direction. He left the EOS community as the #1 EOS implementer measured by number of sessions and revenue. Greg believes in taking clients to the summit of their mountains - and, importantly, helping them actually enjoy the climb. Greg created PINNACLE Business Guides because he kept encountering leaders who were frustrated and getting stuck in the same places. These leaders needed actionable tools to get unstuck, avoid roadblocks, and keep moving upward. This isn't about theory. It's about action and results - and celebrating the milestones on the way up.Stop the grind and enjoy the climb!